During the mid-1980s, as Northwestern football crested into its just being complete ass zenith, someone decided that a good gimmick would be to lock Willie the Wildcat up in a cage until Northwestern scored. Even for a normal football program this seems like a questionable mascot practice-- I am not sure that parading a plush Wildcat into the stadium like a captured Visigoth chieftain really works from a rallying the fans standpoint, for example Bucky Badger gets to ride around on its own custom fire truck-- but in the case of the 1980s Wildcats, this is one of the funniest things to ever happen as they got blanked time and time again before they decided that keeping the mascot stuck in a cage for an entire football game had become needlessly cruel.